For scientific papers on AGW, record happenings in the Arctic and the Greenland, Himalayan and Antarctic icesheets. Also weatherstorms and higher than average rainfalls and other extreme weather events.

Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch1&v=VYnReLNLAZ0[youtube]

This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a member of NASA's Sea Level Change team.

If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 -- enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; CU Boulder; the University of South Florida in Tampa; and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The team, driven to understand and better predict Earth’s response to a warming world, published their work Feb. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is almost certainly a conservative estimate," Nerem said. "Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that's not likely."

Prof Eric Rignot did warn that “non linearities” could upset calculations of sea level rise. Acceleration is non–linear: it is exponential, the integral of ∆v/∆t, like compound interest and we will be paying that interest if we don’t get more serious about reducing emissions and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

PS, can’t get the YouTube to behave. Play it in the linked article or download from here.

Abbott & Co are going to cause the mother and father of all recessions—be prepared!

Yes HBSG.... or can I just call you Monk, please.? Um I haven't checked your link. I will.

This rise in sea levels WILL happen, and it is a shame that politics, particularly here in Australia, find it hard to grasp this fact.

I became aware of this possibility/certainty over 30 years ago, when the first people started talking about the future for THE planet, and our impacts upon it. Virtually nothing has been done. OK we banned HFC's and some other ozone-depleting gases, which HAS had a positive impact on the Antarctic Hole... but this is stuff all. !

IT does prove we CAN have a + impact, and it also shows, despite all contrary argument.. that we have had -negative impact. To say different is arrogance and ignorance of the highest order.

Ummm.. I chose my property based on several factors.. I have a creek at my foot, BUT it will never flood my home. I'm on the high side of the meander that enters and exits my lower western boundary.I may get stranded due to flooding downstream, but hey I'll manage.I am on high ground. It is roughly 25 mtr above sea level. Amazing to think that my home could one day be on an Island.!

In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.

Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast Southern Ocean. Further inland, the glaciers widen into a two-mile-thick reserve of ice covering an area the size of Texas.

There’s no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when.

The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans—an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.

To figure that out, scientists have been looking back to the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago, when global temperatures stood at roughly their current levels. The bad news? There’s growing evidence that the Pine Island Bay glaciers collapsed rapidly back then, flooding the world’s coastlines—partially the result of something called “marine ice-cliff instability.”

The ocean floor gets deeper toward the center of this part of Antarctica, so each new iceberg that breaks away exposes taller and taller cliffs. Ice gets so heavy that these taller cliffs can’t support their own weight. Once they start to crumble, the destruction would be unstoppable.

“Ice is only so strong, so it will collapse if these cliffs reach a certain height,” explains Kristin Poinar, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We need to know how fast it’s going to happen.”

In the past few years, scientists have identified marine ice-cliff instability as a feedback loop that could kickstart the disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet this century—much more quickly than previously thought.

Minute-by-minute, huge skyscraper-sized shards of ice cliffs would crumble into the sea, as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as deep underwater as the height of the Empire State Building. The result: a global catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen.

was watching something on the teev recently. There was a period in which vast mud/sand layers were left for our understanding couple of thousand years ago. A large shelf of rock fell into the North sea? in Norway and caused a Tsunami which devastated much of western UK. No-one much lived there at the time. The UK was still part of the European continent. Might have been about the First Britons.